The Boston Globe, Wednesday, August 4, 2004, Living, Page D1

AWARD PUTS SPOTLIGHT ON AN INNOVATIVE PRINTMAKER

By Christine Temin, Globe Staff

Debra Olin is a printmaker. In the art hierarchy, such as it still exists, that puts her somewhere down the ladder from artists working in bronze, marble, or oil on canvas. At 53, she has no commercial gallery representation, she's sold very little work, and she's rarely exhibited outside New England.

Supporting herself through a series of part-time jobs, she's the epitome of the struggling, under-recognized artist. Or at least she was until a recent telephone call from Nick Capasso, a curator at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, who told her she was the fifth winner of the Rappaport Prize. Funded by the Jerome Lyle Rappaport Charitable Foundation and administered by the DeCordova, the $20,000 award is intended to give a boost to talented individuals who haven't yet "made it" in art world terms.

It's the largest public annual grant to an artist in New England. Artists don't apply for it. The curatorial staff at the DeCordova and the museum's director, Paul Master-Karnik, choose the winner based on their thorough knowledge of the scene. Capasso estimates that the museum's three curators make a total of 200 studio visits a year and look at portfolios submitted by many more artists.

"This award could justifiably go to a great many people," says Capasso. "We'd given it to object-makers for the last few years, so we thought that this time it ought to go to someone working in 2-D. The last two recipients were men, and not from the Boston area, so a local woman would balance that out."

That narrowed the candidates down to a number in the hundreds, if not thousands. Why Olin? "I've followed Debra's work as long as I've been at the DeCordova," Capasso says. "She's probably the most innovative printmaker in New England, using the monoprint medium to create layered works inspired by clothing, nature, and history."

Not only was Olin struggling; her medium is, too. "Printmaking has been neglected in the last decade," says Capasso. "We felt it would be a good idea to give the award to someone working in an unfashionable art form. Of course, all she has to do is wait a few years and printmaking will become the next hot thing. It's like hemlines."

Olin isn't waiting at all to use her prize money to buy a larger printing press than the one in her crowded Somerville basement studio. She currently has to travel to another Somerville studio with a large press for part of her process.

The results hang wall-to-wall in her "real" studio, the one in the basement, and if you stare at them for a few minutes you notice recurring themes. Clothing; hands; chains; text; maps; globes. Olin marries the cosmic with the individual. Her palette is dominated by a red the color of dried blood, but there's nothing gory about it, just something deeply human, a continuation of her exploration of inside and out. She makes her prints in translucent layers that allow images to seep into one another. She uses richly textured Japanese papers that look ethereal but are, she says, actually quite tough: "They stand up to being put through a press numerous times."

Olin began as a potter, not a printmaker. Her thesis project for the master's degree in ceramics she earned at the Massachusetts College of Art in 1980 was "Gallery as Mold," for which she lined an entire room in clay. That got ceramics out of her system.

She floundered, starting a window display business and not making art until the late 1980s, when she began creating prints.

"The first ones I made that had a real direction," she says, "were about my grandparents - about loss of culture and immigration. My grandparents spoke Yiddish, but my parents didn't: They wanted to assimilate." Those prints ended up in a show at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum.

Olin spent four summers studying Yiddish at Columbia University, part of an attempt to regain her lost heritage.

"My grandfather was a tailor," she says. Hence the zippers, sewing needles, and mannequins around her studio, along with white gloves and a feathered hat.

"I've used my grandmother's clothes a lot in my works," she adds. The prints are filled with images of flattened dresses, aprons, buttons, and the soles of shoes, floating through space, with other images lurking behind them.

Her grandmother was also the inspiration for the hands that appear frequently in her prints. "They say your sense of touch is the last one you lose," Olin notes. "I remember my mother rubbing lotions into my grandmother's skin when she was dying, to comfort her. Her skin was as thin as paper."

Will the Rappaport Prize jump-start her career?

When something good does happen to her, including Harvard's Fogg Art Museum buying one of her works, "I tend to look at it as an isolated event," she says.

Among recent not-so-good moments: Her rejection from a show at the Bromfield Gallery. The Bromfield offered an exhibition to an artist without commercial gallery representation. It's a big category: The gallery was deluged with 140 applications. "I wasn't even among the 13 finalists," Olin says. "But you can't win everything."

What she has won is going to be an ongoing award. Jerome and Phyllis Rappaport initially signed on for five years, but, says Jerome Rappaport, "Our expectation is that we'll continue to make the prize available, and perhaps add other philanthropy in the arts."

"I'm just glad I can continue my work," Olin says. "If I'd wanted to be rich I could have gone into some other field."